As the popularity of wireless communications systems increases and the variety of types of data communications services offered increases, there is an ever increasing demand for the limited available air link resources, e.g., frequency spectrum, allocated to a given base station for its cell. In addition, the number of users and user demand for resources can vary as a function of time and events which can cause anticipated and unanticipated peaks in demand. High numbers of concurrent active users in a cell create challenges to satisfy the users' needs to communicate uplink and/or downlink user data in a timely manner while not expending a large portion of those air link resources for control signaling purposes. Resources that are utilized for control signaling purposes such as assignments reduce the amount of resources available to communicate user data. Complicating the efficient use of resources is the fact that, there are typically a variety of different types of users and/or applications which may have different traffic channel resource demands and requirements such as latency, acceptable error rate, etc.
One method of assignment used for traffic channel segments, is for a base station attachment point to allocate a unique base station assigned user identifier to each of the wireless terminals it is to be servicing, and then include that assignment identifier in an assignment message. However, as the number of potential current users increases, the number of bits needed to uniquely represent the user identifier increases, thus increasing the overhead signaling in each communicated assignment message. Generally this method also treats each of the users equally in that each user could potentially be assigned to any given traffic channel segment, even though some of the users may be more likely to be allocated a high number of traffic channel segments while others may be allocated a low number of traffic channel segments than other users in a given time interval.
While the known assignment method may be adequate for some applications, it would be beneficial if new and improved methods and apparatus were available for traffic channel assignment. It would be desirable if at least some new methods and apparatus could efficiently support a high number of users, provide flexibility in terms of accommodating different types of users/applications/current needs, and/or limit control signaling overhead as compared to other techniques.